How do I manually add subtitles to YouTube?

You can now set up your Amara account to sync directly with YouTube. These instructions are for adding subtitles manually if you do not wish to automate this process.

Download subtitles from Amara

You must download subtitles from Amara to your computer in one of the two following YouTube-recognized formats:

SRT (the standard subtitle format supported by most video players)

SBV (YouTube format)

When selecting a format to download:

A Caption File (.SRT or .SBV format) contains both the text and information about when each line of text should be displayed.

If you download a caption file (.SRT or .SBV) from Amara and upload it to your YouTube video, it will be synced with the timing of the speech and sounds in the video.

A Transcript File (.TXT format), on the other hand, contains only the text of what was said in the video.

If your transcript file (.TXT format) is in a language other than English, the text will not be synced with the timing of speech and sounds in the video.

At present, YouTube uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for English videos and transcripts, with plans to roll out this service for other languages. ASR uses speech processing algorithms to determine timing for displaying the words in a transcript.

There are three steps to downloading subtitles from an Amara video to your computer:

1. Navigate to the Video tab on your selected video’s page.

2. Under View Subtitles, select the subtitle language you wish to download.

This will bring you to the language page.

3. click Download Subtitles and select the desired format from the drop-down list:

The selected subtitles will be downloaded to your computer. You will now be able to view or edit the file in atext editor of your choice or upload them to the video player.

Upload subtitles to YouTubeNow that you have downloaded your caption file (.SRT or .SBV format) or transcript (.TXT format file) from Amara, you may upload it to your video on YouTube.

There are 10 steps to uploading your subtitles to YouTube. To add captions or subtitles to one of your videos, log into your YouTube account to upload your caption (SRT, SBV) or transcript (TXT) file and: